The email that helped Salesforce reach $100m in recurring revenue
Aaron Ross helped SalesForce reach $100 million in recurring revenue. See his insights below taken from his iconic book ‘Predictable Revenue’.
Email an executive
“The biggest bottleneck in prospecting into companies isn’t selling the decision maker, it’s finding them in the first place.”
“Write a totally short and sweet different email to executives simply asking for a referral to the right person at the company.”
Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue
What happened when he tried this? A 500% increase in results.
Why would this work?
Executives give a damn. Ok, ok, not all of them but they know the best people to contact and they are excited about moving things forward.
Aaron’s key tips
- It’s important to make it short and sweet
- Don’t sell
- You want to make sure you are asking for just one thing, which is a referral
- Give people enough information, but in a short way. The trick is to being specific enough about who you should talk to, or what you do, in a very short way.
- It’s critical to get clear on your ideal customer profile e.g. ’25–250 employees, large enough to buy but not so large they’d hire someone in-house to do it’
How to contact executives using Anymail finder.
Can you google for say ‘marketing managers in San Francisco’ and get their emails? Yes you can and it’s rapidly growing in popularity.
Install the Dux-Soup extension
Once installed do the following:
- Click the extension button and choose the ‘X-ray’ option to run your search
- Download the results into a csv file and upload that to Anymailfinder.
Here’s a video summary of the process
You now have your executive list to contact
Import them into your email follow up tool to send your ‘short and sweet’ email. Then watch the analytics, edit and improve the email until it is solid.
See Aaron’s full posting